Tales from the Office on Employee Recognition, Employee Rewards, Life Hacks, Gamification, and Human Resources.

Monthly Archives: February 2017

Leaders of organizations must shape their company’s culture. Incentivizing behaviors is one of the best ways to handle culture change. You cannot afford to jeopardize the overall morale of the employees and affect the overall productivity, because of fractured values of your company culture.

You can help your employees overcome unaligned behavior by incentivizing behavior changes with practical steps without affecting productivity.

Focusing on Inward Employee Improvement

Vineet Nayar is the former CEO of HCL Technologies and an author of a book considered a revolution in management, “Employees First, Customers Second“. His company has succeeded the challenge of tripling its turnover ($4.2 billions today). He agrees focus on inward improvement will lead to strong company culture and high employee retention.

Incentivizing behavior changes in the employees is the new frontier for optimizing enterprises. Instead of pressuring employees to do their work, smart companies come up with creative ways of reenforcing positive behaviors.

For instance, a company that struggles with employees who report to work late may decide to focus on what it means to go above and beyond. In this case, the management may introduce rewards for those who get to work early. This is a simple way of incentivizing behaviors towards the exceptional. At the end of the day, the company will have a more aligned culture, one directed away from coming in late.

Employee Recognition for the Win

Incentivizing behavior changes has proved to be effective and quite rewarding. Besides getting your employees to be in sync, the productivity levels and the morale increase significantly. While bonuses are good, there are other practical ways to recognize and incentivize behavior change in employees. For instance, if an employee is named in customer feedback as exceptional, reward them with a special experience, a job title change, or a monetary gift such as a Kindle Unlimited subscription (If you haven’t tried it, the Kindle is awesome).

Peer-to-peer Employee Recognition

The coveted form of employee recognition is peer-to-peer, or when staff recognize each other for great work. A quality peer-to-peer program is one that is based on the goals and values of your company. In Recognize, staff send badges based on company values. Staff can receive points for those badges that can be redeemed. If an organization is seeking to improve customer experience, they can reward high-value employees in customer service with a field trip to Disney, where they have a program to learn more about customer care.

Act like One of the Top 100 Places to Work

How about setting up a kid’s center where employees can bring their children? This will create a work/life balance for the staff. You could get on-site medical practitioners to keep checking on the overall well-being of your employees. By providing these perks, staff feel like they are in a special club and can take their mind off other life issues.

Introduce relaxing services like manicure, laundry, yoga, massage sessions and any other thing that will reduce stress levels. You can provide passionate employees access to a mentor.